remember to get exercise and eat well, too. if you do nothing but sit in front of the computer all day and eat terrible food you'll put yourself in a position where it's easier to injure yourself... taking care of your body means more than just getting some ergonomic equipment. if you develop good habits now, they'll last you for a lifetime.
content owners have made it difficult to obtain hi def tv inputs for computers. all the cheap ones you can get will only import SDTV over the wire. the cheap HDTV ones only bring in OTA HDTV, which is useless for your purposes. you'd have to move up to professional input cards (and prices) to get HDTV input over the wire.
perhaps instead of trying to monitor the video output, you could monitor the power output (with intelligent power bars and the xbox power cable somehow locked into the power bar).
just because something is natural doesn't make it inherently desirable or even tolerable - there are plenty of natural diseases you would certainly choose to seek unnatural medical treatment for and there are plenty of natural things that will kill you outright (poisonous mushrooms, bears). you probably wrote this post on an unnatural computer in your unnatural living or working space, bathed in unnatural light from an artificial source, while wearing unnatural clothing and using the wholly unnatural slashdot. clearly some selective unnatural things are quite acceptable and desirable.
also expect to devote someone full time to dealing with netcool.
my experiences with netcool-ISM at two different companies have been unpleasant. their software crashed the probe hosts (running linux) at least once a week, their support department is horrendous, and it is a pita to administrate.
in order to increase reliability, you want to adopt a clustered design - if a machine or two fail, nothing should happen to the service.
in order for all the machines to be able to find the user preferences/passwords/etc, you'll want some sort of common storage for them. it could be on a shared filesystem, in ldap, mysql, etc. ldap is common and a good choice (it has very fast read/query performance) - make sure you use replication so an ldap server failure doesn't take you down (or better yet, a multi-master setup). if you use ldap or sql, make sure you are indexing correctly on the data you most commonly pull up.
in order for all the machines to access the user's mail, you'll want some sort of shared message storage. a shared filesystem is easiest, you could choose from nfs, redhat gfs, veritas cluster fs, etc. if you use nfs, make sure the nfs server can failover to a backup system if the nfs master dies (netapps are great for this).
rather than using round-robin dns, i'd invest in a load balancer. there are some free options for bsd and linux, but the commercial products are very nice and easy to use. f5 labs bigips are very nice, cisco CSSes are garbage.
other suggestions about breaking the services into different groups are spot on. personally, i'd have 3-4 inbound smtp servers inside a loadbalanced pool that handled inbound mail and passed the messages to virus and spam scanning services before delivering them to the shared message store (your load might dictate you need more servers, but if you design right you can just add more as time goes on). i'd probably put pop3 and imap services on those hosts as well, and possibly only allow pop3s and imaps (the ssl encrypted varients).
i'd also have a set of outbound mail servers that users would connect to to relay outbound mail. they would require smtp auth, and possibly only allow connections on smtps ports. spam/virus scanning would be performed before the message was accepted by the server, so users would get immediate feedback if their message didn't go through. the outbounds would not do any local delivery, so they would not mount the shared message store (you'll get proper bounces for all invalid mail addresses this way, instead of smtp rejections for invalid email addresses in local domains).
i'd have another set of servers that did virus and spam scanning for both the inbound and outbound smtp servers. you'd want these machines to have faster cpus than the rest, and virus and spam scanning are usually quite cpu intensive. again, if your load increased (or was more than you had anticipated), the system is easy to grow just by adding more machines.
another set of servers would handle the shared filesystem (if nfs, or gfs exported via gnbd), and possibly also the shared preferences store (ldap).
the final set of servers would handle webmail.
each set of servers should be firewalled from the others (especially the webmail servers, which are probably the most vulnerable to attack), with only the neccessary allowed traffic going through.
qmail and postfix can easily read ldap, i'm sure sendmail can also (as can commercial solutions). anything will work for the smtp daemon.
since you are supporting pop3 users, maildir is a better choice over mailbox for your message stores. courier or cyrus would be a good choice, and come with pop3, imap, and MDA (message delivery agent) components.
i'd have the inbounds accept mail from remote sources immediately (assuming the user being delivered to was valid) and have them hand off the message to an MDA, which would perform spam scanning, virus checking, and any user filtering configured before delivering the message to the user's mailstore. (scanning after the message is accepted uses more resources, but grants you more flexibility - users can have their own spamassassin settings, or you can add any number of filtration steps).
for virus scanning, check out ClamAV. for spam scanning, look at spamassassin (
when you sign up with a comsumer ISP, you do not have an inalienable right to use as much bandwidth as you possibly can. every ISP in the world has less bandwidth connecting them to the rest of the internet than the aggregrate bandwidth of all their customer`s connections to them. were everyone to max out throughput to the ISP, the ISP would be unable to pass all the traffic out to the internet, and EVERYONE`s connection suffers as a result.
The ISPs bandwidth is a resource that is SHARED between all of the ISPs customers. the ISP bases pricing structures and bandwidth requirements on average use by their customers. if, on average, people use a small amount of bandwidth, the ISP can afford to have less upstream bandwidth, and PASS ON the savings to the customer (ie, your $50 a month cable connection).
if, however, a minority of users ABUSES the shared resource, in effect degrading the service for all of their fellow users by overusing bandwidth capacity, then the ISP is left with some hard choices:
- aquire additional upstream bandwidth for an additional cost, and pass the cost onto all their users. everyone goes from $50 per month to $60 per month, with the low bandwidth majority subsidizing the high bandwidth majority
- aquire additional upstream bandwidth for an additional cost, and pass on the cost to the users who are using the network most heavily, ie tiered pricing (which is what at&t is considering)
- do not aquire additional bandwidth, and cap users to prevent them from abusing the network and degrading their fellow customer`s service
- kick off any user who is using too much bandwidth
noone wants to pay more for their existing service, and noone wants to pay extra to subsidize someone else (although by the nature of the situation, they already are subsidizing fellow subscribers) more than they already are.
kicking people off for using their service is something ISPs cannot, and will not do.
therefor, they are left with an obvious solution: cap bandwidth, and offer tiered service for people who are greatly affected by the cap.
it is a very clear problem, and a very clear solution. it should not be brought up over and over on slashdot.
if you want to bitch, then you have two options: bitch about the people who are using so much bandwidth that they are forcing the ISPs to implement these changes (and it IS the minority of users ruining it for the majority), or pony up the dough for a network connection that comes with guaranteed bandwidth (ie, a t1, or other business class service)
you pay for what you get. as pointed out, you can`t pay $50 for bandwidth that costs $500+ (T1, etc).
The Society for Information Display is holding their conference in San Jose next week, the largest display technology conference ever in North America.
As well as floor exhibits from various vendors, there will be a section dedicated to showing off the latest in display technologies (actually working).
I think tuesday and wednesday the floor is open to the public ($10 at the door, maybe). check out the website for more info: http://www.sid.org
= transmit (trns-mt, trnz-)
= v. tr.
= 5a.Electronics. To send (a signal), as by
= wire or radio.
=
= Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the = English Language, Third Edition
transmit is to send information, not receive it. the TOS never mentions anything about what is acceptable to download, only upload.
"7.1.3 post or transmit any information or software that contains a virus, trojan horse, worm or other harmful component;"
Slashdot Mirror
exactly. automation has been happening at the current minimum wage levels (see: self checkout at stores).
they are just trying to give cover to something they'd already been planning on doing.
just have the system scan for curse words. easier than detecting emotion, and probably more accurate to determine when people are hating the IVR.
remember to get exercise and eat well, too. if you do nothing but sit in front of the computer all day and eat terrible food you'll put yourself in a position where it's easier to injure yourself... taking care of your body means more than just getting some ergonomic equipment. if you develop good habits now, they'll last you for a lifetime.
"This attack is hardware specific, but unfortunately, it is specific to Intel's popular DQ35 motherboards."
that seems unfortunate only to those who have a DQ35 motherboard. for everyone else, it's fortunate that it's specific to just those boards.
content owners have made it difficult to obtain hi def tv inputs for computers. all the cheap ones you can get will only import SDTV over the wire. the cheap HDTV ones only bring in OTA HDTV, which is useless for your purposes. you'd have to move up to professional input cards (and prices) to get HDTV input over the wire.
perhaps instead of trying to monitor the video output, you could monitor the power output (with intelligent power bars and the xbox power cable somehow locked into the power bar).
just because something is natural doesn't make it inherently desirable or even tolerable - there are plenty of natural diseases you would certainly choose to seek unnatural medical treatment for and there are plenty of natural things that will kill you outright (poisonous mushrooms, bears). you probably wrote this post on an unnatural computer in your unnatural living or working space, bathed in unnatural light from an artificial source, while wearing unnatural clothing and using the wholly unnatural slashdot. clearly some selective unnatural things are quite acceptable and desirable.
this must be their best shot to combat their enormous shredding budget.
also expect to devote someone full time to dealing with netcool.
my experiences with netcool-ISM at two different companies have been unpleasant. their software crashed the probe hosts (running linux) at least once a week, their support department is horrendous, and it is a pita to administrate.
quick 15 minute brainfart:
in order to increase reliability, you want to adopt a clustered design - if a machine or two fail, nothing should happen to the service.
in order for all the machines to be able to find the user preferences/passwords/etc, you'll want some sort of common storage for them. it could be on a shared filesystem, in ldap, mysql, etc. ldap is common and a good choice (it has very fast read/query performance) - make sure you use replication so an ldap server failure doesn't take you down (or better yet, a multi-master setup). if you use ldap or sql, make sure you are indexing correctly on the data you most commonly pull up.
in order for all the machines to access the user's mail, you'll want some sort of shared message storage. a shared filesystem is easiest, you could choose from nfs, redhat gfs, veritas cluster fs, etc. if you use nfs, make sure the nfs server can failover to a backup system if the nfs master dies (netapps are great for this).
rather than using round-robin dns, i'd invest in a load balancer. there are some free options for bsd and linux, but the commercial products are very nice and easy to use. f5 labs bigips are very nice, cisco CSSes are garbage.
other suggestions about breaking the services into different groups are spot on. personally, i'd have 3-4 inbound smtp servers inside a loadbalanced pool that handled inbound mail and passed the messages to virus and spam scanning services before delivering them to the shared message store (your load might dictate you need more servers, but if you design right you can just add more as time goes on). i'd probably put pop3 and imap services on those hosts as well, and possibly only allow pop3s and imaps (the ssl encrypted varients).
i'd also have a set of outbound mail servers that users would connect to to relay outbound mail. they would require smtp auth, and possibly only allow connections on smtps ports. spam/virus scanning would be performed before the message was accepted by the server, so users would get immediate feedback if their message didn't go through. the outbounds would not do any local delivery, so they would not mount the shared message store (you'll get proper bounces for all invalid mail addresses this way, instead of smtp rejections for invalid email addresses in local domains).
i'd have another set of servers that did virus and spam scanning for both the inbound and outbound smtp servers. you'd want these machines to have faster cpus than the rest, and virus and spam scanning are usually quite cpu intensive. again, if your load increased (or was more than you had anticipated), the system is easy to grow just by adding more machines.
another set of servers would handle the shared filesystem (if nfs, or gfs exported via gnbd), and possibly also the shared preferences store (ldap).
the final set of servers would handle webmail.
each set of servers should be firewalled from the others (especially the webmail servers, which are probably the most vulnerable to attack), with only the neccessary allowed traffic going through.
qmail and postfix can easily read ldap, i'm sure sendmail can also (as can commercial solutions). anything will work for the smtp daemon.
since you are supporting pop3 users, maildir is a better choice over mailbox for your message stores. courier or cyrus would be a good choice, and come with pop3, imap, and MDA (message delivery agent) components.
i'd have the inbounds accept mail from remote sources immediately (assuming the user being delivered to was valid) and have them hand off the message to an MDA, which would perform spam scanning, virus checking, and any user filtering configured before delivering the message to the user's mailstore. (scanning after the message is accepted uses more resources, but grants you more flexibility - users can have their own spamassassin settings, or you can add any number of filtration steps).
for virus scanning, check out ClamAV. for spam scanning, look at spamassassin (
when you sign up with a comsumer ISP, you do not have an inalienable right to use as much bandwidth as you possibly can. every ISP in the world has less bandwidth connecting them to the rest of the internet than the aggregrate bandwidth of all their customer`s connections to them. were everyone to max out throughput to the ISP, the ISP would be unable to pass all the traffic out to the internet, and EVERYONE`s connection suffers as a result.
The ISPs bandwidth is a resource that is SHARED between all of the ISPs customers. the ISP bases pricing structures and bandwidth requirements on average use by their customers. if, on average, people use a small amount of bandwidth, the ISP can afford to have less upstream bandwidth, and PASS ON the savings to the customer (ie, your $50 a month cable connection).
if, however, a minority of users ABUSES the shared resource, in effect degrading the service for all of their fellow users by overusing bandwidth capacity, then the ISP is left with some hard choices:
- aquire additional upstream bandwidth for an additional cost, and pass the cost onto all their users. everyone goes from $50 per month to $60 per month, with the low bandwidth majority subsidizing the high bandwidth majority
- aquire additional upstream bandwidth for an additional cost, and pass on the cost to the users who are using the network most heavily, ie tiered pricing (which is what at&t is considering)
- do not aquire additional bandwidth, and cap users to prevent them from abusing the network and degrading their fellow customer`s service
- kick off any user who is using too much bandwidth
noone wants to pay more for their existing service, and noone wants to pay extra to subsidize someone else (although by the nature of the situation, they already are subsidizing fellow subscribers) more than they already are.
kicking people off for using their service is something ISPs cannot, and will not do.
therefor, they are left with an obvious solution: cap bandwidth, and offer tiered service for people who are greatly affected by the cap.
it is a very clear problem, and a very clear solution. it should not be brought up over and over on slashdot.
if you want to bitch, then you have two options: bitch about the people who are using so much bandwidth that they are forcing the ISPs to implement these changes (and it IS the minority of users ruining it for the majority), or pony up the dough for a network connection that comes with guaranteed bandwidth (ie, a t1, or other business class service)
you pay for what you get. as pointed out, you can`t pay $50 for bandwidth that costs $500+ (T1, etc).
The Society for Information Display is holding their conference in San Jose next week, the largest display technology conference ever in North America.
As well as floor exhibits from various vendors, there will be a section dedicated to showing off the latest in display technologies (actually working).
I think tuesday and wednesday the floor is open to the public ($10 at the door, maybe). check out the website for more info: http://www.sid.org
= transmit (trns-mt, trnz-)
= v. tr.
= 5a.Electronics. To send (a signal), as by
= wire or radio.
=
= Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the = English Language, Third Edition
transmit is to send information, not receive it. the TOS never mentions anything about what is acceptable to download, only upload.
"7.1.3 post or transmit any information or software that contains a virus, trojan horse, worm or other harmful component;"